Lots of Questions!

This is a dedicated place for all of your questions and answers about Raw Diets. There are also some really cool groups like "Raw Fed" on the topic you can join. This forum is for people who already know they like the raw diet or sincerely want to learn more. Please remember that you are receiving advice from peers and not professionals. If you have specific health-related questions about your cat's diet, please contact your vet!

I've been researching a raw diet for Greebo for the better part of a year and kept hemming and hawing about it. He's always eaten pretty much what I've given him, but doesn't have much jaw strength right now.

I bought him some Nature's Variety chicken medallions, so right now he's eating that AM/PM plus a chicken heart (cut in 1/2) for a mid-day snack. I think the Nature's Variety might have too much bone in it for him, though : His poop was really hard, not all in one piece, and bits of it were kinda chalky. My original plan was to just let him eat mostly NV until he could handle a whole chicken heart, then start working on muscle meat chunks. But now I'm thinking about adding in some chicken muscle meat now to try to get the bone down to 10%(my understanding is that Nature's Variety is more like 15%). This leads to my first question: how long is that sustainable? For me to balance the bone out, he'd be getting 2.5 oz of NV plus 1 - 1.5 oz of thigh/heart/gizzard. So that's up to like 33% of his diet that wouldn't be balanced because there wouldn't be any organ...Obviously, I don't intend to do that for ever. I CAN find chicken liver (but haven't tried feeding it yet), but haven't been able to source another chicken organ quite yet. How long can I do that - like a month? Or less than that?

My second question is about variety. I read he needs at least 3 different proteins. Is it acceptable for those to all be poultry? He can't eat beef, venison, or pork and I've never gotten him to even taste rabbit, though I'm willing to try that again with a raw rabbit instead of canned. I can get chicken, turkey, Cornish hen, duck, and quail, though the quail is pretty expensive. Is that enough? I'm still working on trying to find organs other than chicken liver, ultimately I'd like to have multiple varieties of each.

Let me try to help and clarify a few things. I think you'd be ok for a month with your test, but I wouldn't go much longer than that. First, you should try the liver sooner rather than later to be sure he'll eat it. Second, there really isn't another chicken organ you can use for organ meat. I've been told chickens have kidneys but I don't know where they are on a chicken and they're so small that I don't know how you could find enough to make up your percentage. Last, you need to serve liver AND another organ, not one or the other. (80% muscle meat, which includes hearts and gizzards, 10% bone, 5% liver, 5% other secreting organ.)

Why can't he eat those other meats? Is it allergies? Keep in mind that a lot of times a cat will be allergic to a canned protein, but eating it raw doesn't bother them at all. I don't think I'd be comfortable with 3 poultry variations. Try the rabbit and see what other options you have. Can he have lamb? Bison? Can you get any "weird" proteins where you live?

Last, assuming you're not feeding those meats because of allergies, it's generally agreed that the allergy is to the protein, not the organs. In other words, even if he's allergic to beef he can have beef kidney for your "other" organ. I use sweetbreads because BK is not fond of kidneys and it's very hard to find anything else. And BTW, BK is a severe allergy case, which is why we started raw in the first place. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions about that.

I did pick up some chicken liver today and he was all over me while I was cutting it into little chunks to freeze. I gave him a piece when I was done and he ate it as soon as I put it down, so we've got one organ down

He's violently thrown up any non-poultry protein I've tried him on so far. Like not just regular throwing up, but crying and projectile vomiting, then dry heaving long after his stomach was empty. He reacted that way to canned and raw beef, canned venison, and raw pork. He didn't throw up when I gave him some canned food that had fish in it, but after about a week of eating that he got really itchy and his ears were gunky. After all that I've just stuck with poultry.

That's AMAZING if I can give him organs from an animal he can't handle the muscle meat from. The international market has all kinds of crazy pig/cow organs, but I figured he would react the same way to those as he did the muscle meat. They also have rabbit, so I will swing by soon and pick one up to try.

I live in an area with a big population, so I have access to a pretty huge variety of more exotic meats. I know a butcher close by has ostrich, goose and alligator. I just get sticker shock looking at the price per pound of some of the more exotic meats!

Are there guidelines for variety like there are for meat/bones/liver/other organ? Like that I shouldn't feed more than x% of any one protein? I can get chicken thighs for $0.87/lb, but I don't want to overfeed chicken. I know he needs other stuff! I was planning on using mostly quail for his bone-in meals, since the bones are so small.

I too would hesitate to feed only poultry, but I know that there are people who feel that they don't want to feed meat that is not representative of what a wild small cat would eat, so poultry, rabbit, and mice.

I would continue to feed some muscle meat with the medallions and include enough liver over the course of a week to make up 5% of the diet. But, you do need to find some kidneys or something for him too and, as BK said, you can't buy any poultry organs other than liver because they are too small. If you buy a game hen and cut it up, you will see the tiny kidneys near the spine toward the back of the bird. They are way too small form anyone to bother collecting and selling. Lamb kidneys are my cats' favorite "other" organ.

Other protein sources you can try are lamb, goat, bison, emu, and llama. I would cut the meat up into very small pieces at first until he gets used to them. I also would keep away from the beef, but maybe try to raw pork again with just a tiny piece or two to see how he handles it. You could alos try raw venison becuase, again as BK said, some cats can handle the raw form of a protein source, but not the cooked.canned version.

A point about using the quail as a source of bone. This will not balance out the remainder of his diet because a quail is balanced in and of itself, The same is true of whole prey mice, so you'll need to get some other bone in the diet eventually.

I have never heard of a rule percentage of this protein source vs. that protein source. The closest is that you should feed dark meat as well as light meat because dark meat has more taurine which, as I'm sure you know, is an essential amino acid for cats

I've never heard of a real rule either for variety. The general rule of thumb is, the more the better. Only because one protein may be low in a nutrient while another may be high, so you're kind of "covering your bases" with variety. That said, vomiting trumps variety! I would just try small bits of as many things as you can get and see how he does. Meanwhile you can throw down some chicken ribs and then move on to wings and necks so he can build up some jaw strength as you experiment and you won't be stuck with only giving quail bones.

I seem to have lucked out with one of those cats that was just waiting for me to finally feed him real food.

He's been pretty "meh" about the NV medallions lately and ALL ABOUT some chicken hearts, so I gave him a 1/4 of a quail this morning to see how it would go. After I cut it into two pieces to get him started he just went to town. The bone took him a little while to figure out, but I just watched and he eventually ate everything except a 1" piece of the thigh bone. I'm super proud of him, I was concerned about whether or not he'd eat the bones.

For now, I'm thinking I'm just going to find my 2nd organ and hold him steady at quail, chicken thighs, organs, and the NV medallions until the medallions are all used up. After that maybe I'll try out rabbit to get something other than poultry in there. I feel bad that I have so much NV now! I figured it would take him a long time to work up to meat chunks and bone since he's missing a couple of teeth...Speaking of teeth, I can already tell a difference in his. He lets me look at them, and they're much less yellow than they were before

See? Isn't it amazing when you watch them eat the way nature intended? There's no rush to get through the NV - you can give one a day or one every other day while you experiment with different varieties of raw. Congratulations! I'm glad he took to it so quickly and easily.

Well, there's a question I've never heard before, mol! I don't know if I'd feed anything out of my yard because of pesticides and stuff, but I suppose if you could manage the killing part you could try it. I don't think I'd be able to kill a frog!

Years ago when I worked with horses our barn cats used to catch snakes, frogs, and grasshoppers and they at them all, so you could try buying frog's legs. As BK said though, be careful of catching any from somewhere that pesticides, etc. hav been sprayed.